What were kings expected to do? In theory, the role and function of kingship remained largely unchanged during our period: a ruler had to be pious, just, prudent, act with valour in arms, never succumb to greed, ambition, or anger, always take the advice of his nobles, and be generous to his foes. The one new element that emerged in the course of the twelfth century was mansuetudo—that is, ease of manners. In the early thirteenth century, this was elaborated upon by Gerald of Wales, a former clerk for the Angevin kings of England: mansuetudo made a ruler’s other virtues shine ever more brightly; after all, a true monarch was to be loved rather than feared, as the best means of ensuring that firm rule would not lapse into tyranny.43 Later on during the thirteenth century, the growing reception of Aristotle (see Chapter 5), increasing access to a much more abstract theory of political power, was also reflected in a greater variety of theoretical treatises on the proper exercise of kingship, such as Vincent of Beauvais’s De Morali Principis Instructione (c.1250), the anonymous Libro de la nobleza y lealtad (c.1250-60), dedicated to Ferdinand III of Castile (d. 1252), the Norse Konungsskuggsja (c.1260), or Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum (c.1277-9). All these texts shared an increasing emphasis on the degree to which kingship constituted an office that had been granted by God, and that brought with it temptations as well as duties and opportunities. Kings ruled their realm not as their private property, but on behalf of their subjects and with the obligation to work for the common good.
At first sight, it may seem a contradiction that our period also witnessed an increasing emphasis on the sacrality of kingship. This emphasis on the transcendental legitimization of power and its origins is evident, for instance, in the increasing use of the Dei gratia (‘by the grace of God’) formula in the self-titulation of kings, and the frequency with which kings and their chancery emphasized the divinely ordained nature of the monarch’s office. This was taken furthest by the Capetian kings of France, who, from the late eleventh century onwards, were credited with the ability to heal scrofula. From the twelfth century, this was combined with a representation of royal lordship, which, in the writings of Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (d. 1151), sanctified the kingdom of France and the position of its rulers by linking both to the cult of Saint Denis (d. c.250), the ‘Apostle of Gaul’, and which, in the late thirteenth century, derived further sacral legitimacy from the canonization of Louis IX (1226-70). No other European monarchy went to similar lengths, although all of them witnessed efforts to emphasize the sacral nature of a dynasty or office. We can thus, for instance, witness a growing number of royal saints, especially in Hungary and Bohemia, but also in Scandinavia. Equally, the Ottonian rulers of Germany produced a series of saintly princesses, as well as Saint (Emperor) Henry II (1002-24) and ‘Saint’ Charlemagne, canonized in the twelfth century, while in England both Henry II and Henry III sought to foster the cult of Edward the Confessor (1042-66).
None of these cases led, however, to claims of dynastic sanctity. Rather, this emphasis on sacral legitimacy was aimed at underlining the standing and prestige of a ruler and his relatives by emphasizing the number of virtuous relatives their dynasty had produced in the past, to exemplify the divine favour that had been shown to them before, and to underline the degree to which the success of a ruler, his legitimacy and authority, were ultimately derived not from men, but from God alone. This was thus not a licence for royal power to be exercised without constraint. Rather, it was an attempt to bind those who held power to a set of abstract rules and principles. Power used unwisely or without due consideration would endanger not only the welfare of the realm, but also the souls of rulers and ruled alike. Notions of divinely inspired kingship certainly served to raise the numinous status of a ruler, but they also reduced the ability of the individual monarch to override fundamental principles of good kingship. Exactly because the royal office had been divinely ordained, an individual king might be deemed to have failed his duties not only to men, but to God, and could thus be more justly rejected and replaced.
This emphasis on the sacral nature of power went hand in hand with an unprecedented expansion in the tools and the apparatus of governance. Most importantly perhaps, an explosion in the use of literacy from the eleventh century onwards provided monarchs (as well as many local or regional lords) with a whole new set of mechanisms to perform their duties. One indication of the increasing use of literacy in royal government is the exploding number of charters produced by royal chanceries. In the Holy Roman Empire, for example, we have about 500 surviving charters for the fifty-year reign of Henry IV (1056-1106), about 1,200 for the thirty-eight years of Frederick Barbarossa (1152-90), and an estimated 2,600 for the thirty-eight years of Frederick II (1212-50). This rise in the production of royal documents from the eleventh to the thirteenth century remains remarkable, especially when we take into account that these figures do not always include letters and other shorter texts. Even the output of Frederick II’s chancery pales, however, in comparison with that of his contemporary, Henry III of England. A rough estimate of the various acta recorded in the Pipe, Liberate, Close, Charter, and Patent Rolls for the reign of Henry III (1216-72) would come to about 30,000 individual items being issued every year. From the twelfth century onwards, rulers also began to utilize the increasing refinement of legal training provided at both cathedral schools and the emerging universities (see Chapter 5). More and more, monarchs drew on a legally trained pool of clerics to staff their administration. We thus also witness an elaboration of the administrative apparatus available to kings. In France during the reign of Philip Augustus, the number of prevotes—administrative sub-units designed to oversee parts of the royal domain—increased to about 40-50 by 1200, while from the 1180s onwards baillis, or groups of itinerant royal officials, were appointed to sit in judgment in legal cases, explore royal rights, and administer royal prerogatives. Although England and France are perhaps the best-documented examples for this development, they were not the only ones. We know, for instance, that the kings of Norman Sicily produced a similarly elaborate system of record keeping and administration, as did many Italian cities, and, from about 1260 onwards, the rulers of Aragon.
This increasing administrative sophistication also strengthened the significance of the court, where the majority of records were produced and kept. The increasing bulk of business dealt with by royal courts (and some ducal or comital ones, like those of Flanders, Normandy, and Barcelona) required their expansion in size and personnel, and that they remained fairly static. One of the key developments of this period was thus the development of preferred residences: Paris in the case of the kings of France, Burgos in the kingdom of Castile, Palermo and Naples in Sicily, Krakow in Poland, or Westminster in England. This did not apply everywhere, of course: the sheer size of the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the lack of a tradition of ‘central locations’, required its rulers to keep touring the realm. At best, as under the Ottonian and Salian emperors (919-1125), some royal palaces or towns—such as Speyer, Bamberg, or Magde-burg--were visited more frequently than others, but this often changed from ruler to ruler, and no permanent royal centre emerged. Furthermore, despite successive attempts in the thirteenth century, no firm system of centralized royal control developed in the empire, and administration remained largely devolved to regional lords: there were no central archives, for instance, and the imperial charters that are still extant survive largely as copies kept by their recipients. This did not mean that rulers themselves remained static. In November and December 1268, for example, Henry III of England stayed at Westminster (until 9 Nov.), before travelling via Windsor (11-12 Nov.) and Guildford (15 Nov.) to Winchester, where he stayed 17-25 Nov., and Clarendon (28 Nov.-10 Dec.). He then visited the Cistercian house at Beaulieu (14-15 Dec.), the town of Southampton (16 Dec.), and Bishop’s Waltham (19 Dec.), before returning to Westminster.44
This increasing bureaucratic sophistication also meant that the functions of rulers were more and more devolved to their officials, and that the codification of legal procedures and principles became a common phenomenon. With the exception of England, where the Conquest of 1066 presented a special case, few official attempts were made to codify laws and legal customs until the thirteenth century. Many of those compiled were produced by lawyers or private individuals, such as the so-called Laws of Edward the Confessor, William I, or Henry I in twelfth-century England, the Tres ancien coutumier (c.1200 and c.1220), and the Grand coutumier (c.1250) in Normandy, or the Sachsenspiegel (‘Mirror of the Saxons’) compiled by Eike of Regpow in Germany in c.1220. That is, they were often academic treatises, without legal force, and frequently describing local customs rather than those of the realm as a whole. The lead, as so often, was taken by churchmen (see Chapter 5). It was not until towards the end of our period, however, that rulers and princes attempted anything comparable. In 1231, for example, Frederick II issued the Liber Augustalis, a compilation of his and his predecessors’ legal pronouncements as kings of Sicily, followed, in 1235, by the Reichsland-frieden (imperial land peace) of Mainz, which sought to codify basic principles defining the relationship between princely and royal authority. In France during the 1240s Louis IX began to compile royal rights, privileges, and laws, as did Edward I in England during the 1270s. Similarly, Alfonso X of Castile (1252-84) commissioned a series of legal codes: the Fuero real of c.1255, the Especulo of c.1261, and the Sietepartidas from c.1265.
This did not necessarily engender legal uniformity. New law codes often took several generations to be accepted—the Siete partidas, for instance, were not fully used until the mid-fourteenth century—and certain groups within the realm, depending on their political clout, could easily maintain special rights and privileges. Thus, across Europe, certain laws did not apply to members of the clergy, while in France in 1315 members of the aristocracy united in provincial leagues to maintain their privileges. Similarly, the subjects of the Crown of Aragon could cite different municipal laws, and could demand to be judged according to their religious status, with different procedures and norms applying to Christians, Jews, or Muslims. Nonetheless, that these variant customs were codified confirms the growing importance of having rights and privileges put into writing.
The codification of legal customs could serve both to strengthen royal power and to resist it. While monarchs or magnates sought to extend their power by defining more clearly the services they were owed, their subjects could equally use codification to document and defend what they deemed to be their rights. This in itself was by no means a new development: many monastic houses had used similar means to document (or claim) their freedom from episcopal or noble control. Nonetheless, the desire of laymen to have their privileges and customs codified was given an added sense of urgency, as noble prerogatives were increasingly challenged by the burgeoning bureaucratic apparatus at the disposal of kings and many of the more powerful territorial lords. To some extent, the rise of administrative kingship from the twelfth century onwards created its own countervailing forces. The thirteenth century was also a period when kings were increasingly forced to concede charters of liberties and to codify the exemptions customarily claimed by their nobles. This formed the background, for instance, to Magna Carta in England (1215), the Statutum in Favorem Principum (‘Statute in Favour of the Princes’) in Germany (1232), and the privileges granted by the duke of Poland in 1284.
Part of the reason why nobles began to insist on having their rights codified was because the maintaining of justice and the maximizing of royal revenue were not always kept clearly separate. After all, the favourite sanction for the violation of laws was a monetary fine, directly benefiting the royal treasury (or the coffers of whoever controlled justice). This was stated explicitly in some of the surviving law collections from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which presented a carefully constructed catalogue of fines, a proportion of which was to be handed to the king or his agents. The kings of England developed the system to particular perfection: even the wrong choice of phrase in legal documents triggered a fine, normally at the king’s discretion. There was thus a good reason why Magna Carta contained a clause that justice was not to be sold or bought. Similarly, when, in Aragon in 1320, the so-called Shepherds’ Crusade resulted in attacks on Jewish communities—in theory under the king’s protection—this resulted in half-hearted efforts to protect Jews, and in an impressive bureaucratic exercise to extract fines from those localities where massacres had occurred. In addition, royal officials were called upon to oversee the administration of royal estates, and to collect dues and taxes from local communities. Many of these payments were defined on an ad hoc basis, and for much of the central Middle Ages general taxation remained a rarity. One exception was the Danegeld due to the kings of England until the early twelfth century, which originated in payments to fund the defence of the realm against the Vikings. From the thirteenth century onwards, developing mechanisms for financing the crusades led to a more regular taxation of ecclesiastical income, initially overseen by the papacy, but increasingly utilized by rulers to pay for their own expenses as well. General taxation of the laity, by contrast, remained rare. Rather, a system of voluntary aids and contributions continued from the tenth until well into the fourteenth century. Instead, rulers took to taxing commerce, including the Castilian sales tax of alcabala, introduced by Alfonso X, or the moneda ferera, paid since 1202 to the king of Castile in exchange for the promise that he would not debase his kingdom’s currency.
To some extent this increasing emphasis on the fiscal benefits of royal power reflected the changing nature of warfare in our period. We can witness a move away from armies levied from noble or free landholders who owed military services to their monarch, and towards the hiring of professional soldiers who lent their services in exchange for pay. This was, of course, no linear development that led straight from the Anglo-Saxon fyrd or the German Heerbann—that is, the levy of the freemen of the realm—to the mercenary companies of the early fourteenth century. Rather, we can observe a mixture of forms of recruitment and reward, and the balance was frequently conditioned by the specific circumstances of a particular campaign or region. While, in the eleventh century, the Anglo-Saxon kings of England still recruited their armies from across the free men of the realm, some of their counterparts on the mainland hired troops in exchange for the promise of land or pay, as had been the case in Sicily, when the island’s Muslim rulers sought to recruit Norman knights to fight on their behalf. The Byzantine emperors from the late tenth century maintained the Varangian Guard, which consisted largely of Scandinavian and Norman mercenaries. Nonetheless, from the twelfth century onwards, advances in military technology made warfare a much more uncertain and expensive undertaking, with campaigns getting longer, and requiring a greater range of military expertise. Kings and rulers thus had to spend larger amounts on provisioning their armies or purchasing materials for siege weaponry (and on strengthening the defences of their own castles). Equally, the equipment an individual knight had to procure became more expensive. In England, to give but one example, we witness a steady decline in the number of men owing knight-service, from about 3,000 in c. iioo to about 1,200 in c.1300. This shortfall in manpower had to be made good by hiring knights for pay. Many of the campaigns of the thirteenth century, such as those of Emperor Frederick II against the Lombard League, and even a number of crusades, were thus fought by knights who did so in exchange for monetary rewards. In fact, a number of aristocrats made a career out of selling their military expertise. Don Enrique, for instance, the younger brother of King Alfonso X of Castile, fought in the armies of the Muslim ruler of Tunis, was invited by the king of England to lead an invasion of Sicily, before joining Charles of Anjou (d. 1285) on his Italian campaign of 1263, which led to his election as a senator of Rome.
The rising significance of royal bureaucrats also led to a new phenomenon in the legitimization of political conflicts: the revolt not against the king, but against his evil advisers, and with the aim to control the selection of those individuals who ran the king’s administration. That kings were asked to expel unsuitable advisers was not a new development: it had played a major part during the Investiture Controversy, when Pope Gregory VII listed Emperor Henry IV’s reliance on morally corrupt members of the clergy as a token of Henry’s own depravity, and in England later chroniclers frequently illustrated the tyranny of William Rufus (1087-1100) by his appointment of unsuitable advisers. Nonetheless, ultimately it was still the ruler’s responsibility to choose good advisers, and if he picked morally corrupt officials the fault for doing so rested largely with him. This began to change from c.1200, and most dramatically so in England. From the civil war of 1215 onwards, the question of who administered the realm on the king’s behalf became as important an issue as the political limitations imposed upon royal governance in Magna Carta. Henry III faced two serious rebellions, in 1233-4 and 1258-65. In both cases, most contemporaries (including the rebels themselves) exempted the king from responsibility for the state of the realm, and instead focused their attack on his chief ministers: in 1233-4, for instance, the rebels decided to plunder only the lands belonging to royal advisers, not those of the king himself. Similarly, the demands they made, and how they were recorded by chroniclers and annalists, focused not on the king, but on those who ran his administration: the turbulent state of the realm was the fault not of the king, but of the bureaucrats who cheated him as much as they oppressed his subjects. Equally, when in 1258 the barons demanded a reform of the realm, the issue was not that the king acted like a tyrant, but that his officials did, and that their selection thus ought to be controlled jointly by king and barons. This was a remarkable shift in emphasis compared to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and as such highlights the increasing political (as well as financial and judicial) importance of royal administration: the fact that every new means that strengthened royal control also brought with it heightened resistance, and a new means by which that resistance could be translated into political action.
World History
